Page 27 - WTP Vol. X #7

He was surprised to see her emerge from the pines. He had been sitting behind the wheel trying to calm his shaking hands by tying knots. It was late August, autumn chill in the air, leaves turning. There wasn’t going to be much time. Beside him on the mate’s seat was last week’s newspaper whose rumpled front page reported that in Moscow, downed American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers had been convicted of espionage against the Soviet Union and sentenced to ten years imprisonment. Ten years didn’t sound long.
Linda was dressed in jeans and a thick sweater. The motor idled.
"On the number line, she saw herself going up
only to fourteen for her recent birthday, a primer page in
a Universal encyclopedia of possibly infinitely numbered, disconnected dot to dots. "
“Why did you do that?” she demanded. “Why’d ya come back fah?’
“To say good bye. We’re going back to New York later today. To ask.”
“What?”
“Why do you shake all the time?”
He held up a sloppy bowline knot. “Parkinson’s. Ev’ry thing’s got a name when they don’ know whah t’is.”
“I didn’t feel anything with you either.”
He laughed. “Me, neithah. Ya not a boy, jus’ a green apple. Ya shoulda felt scaihed.”
“What are you scared of?”
“Not much left t’. Surpris’d ain’t bin found, but maybe wasn’ much lookin’.” He tapped the newspaper. “Don’ worry so much about Russians and bombs. But don’
you nevah go nowheah with a strangeah again.” ~
My father smelled like the brown bottles and Old John. It was the cherry pipe smoke and sweat.
My father didn’t shake, but he looked sad. Kathy and I had smashed the beer against the low stone wall, laughing at the explosions of foam, glad to be rebelling against grown up deception.
When I returned from New Hampshire, my parents and brother were waiting in the car in front of my aunt’s and uncle’s house. After the long drive and longer summer, it was good to get out of the car,
a new 1960 Buick station wagon, that Clydesdale of automobiles. I hugged my father, but he didn’t come inside where I carried my sleeping cousin.
I put Kenny to bed while my uncle went around opening windows, and my aunt did something in the kitchen with my mother and brother, who, I noticed, hadn’t stayed with our father. Just another disconnected dot.
As I came out of the bedroom, my mother grabbed my shoulder and pulled me into the pink and gray hall bathroom. She shut and locked the door.
“Your aunt told me. You are just like your father,” she hissed.
I’d never seen her that angry even during the Kennedy-Nixon bouts she had with my father. They argued about everything, but before I’d left for the summer, it was politics. He’d voted for Eisenhower, and she and my aunt were not only Democrats, but also Catholic like Kennedy, who I only cared was handsome.
“It will take every cent we have—and my uncle who is a State Supreme Court judge—to keep your father out of prison and save his license!”
I became so dizzy, I fell. It took hours of that day and years later to make sense out of my mother’s fury. At home that same night, she sent my older brother to my bedroom.
“Are you chaste?!” he demanded.
For the first time in my life I said, “Fuck you.”
Later that September, before the Kennedy–Nixon
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